Company names that are Populr

Hold your horses, blog editor — that was not a typo in the title!

So I was reading about a new magazine the other day - it’s called ELDR (http://www.eldr.com/) and its target readers are elderly and affluent. I’m sure the editors of ELDR dropped the trailing “e” as a means for conveying a new and hip title. And that got me thinking. I like to read a lot about start-ups and emerging technologies and I’ve noticed a pattern, whereby lots of new companies are dropping that trailing “e” from their name.

I guess the early adopters on this front were the Motorola RAZR phone and the photo sharing site flickr, which is now a part of Yahoo. Who else is out there? Well, with some digging into my memory bank and a large assist TechCrunch, I found the following:

• Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues
• graspr, a site that contains a wealth of instructional videos
• jaxtr, a service that allows you to link your phone to the web
• Frappr, a web-based community mapper (acquired by Platial in 2007) [side note: when my friend goes to Starbucks and gets a poorly made drink, he calls it a frappr ;-)]
• YouCastr, which allows anyone to become a sports broadcaster
• Zapr, which allows you to take files on your PC and share them with friends

I’m sure there are others out there. If you know of one that I haven’t listed, drop a comment below to let us know!

I’m not crazy about this “populr” trend (I guess I’m “old school”). So let me give a shout out to a company who did it right: Revver!